1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to portable facsimile equipments which allow duplex communication of data read out from original documents through a line and more particularly, to a portable facsimile equipment which has functions more than the functions of a fixed facsimile equipment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In these years, there have been widely spread facsimile equipments which allow duplex communication of data read out from original documents through a line.
As well known, such conventional facsimile equipments comprise a reader for reading out data from an original document, a transmitter for transmitting the read-out document data through a wired line to a destination party at the other end of the line, a receiver for receiving data received from the destination party through the wire line, and a recorder (thermal recorder) for printing the received data on paper or the like by means of heat transfer or the like.
Most of such facsimile equipments are generally of an installation type which are difficult to move to another place once they are installed at one place.
Further, since this type of conventional facsimile equipments must be connected to the wired line, their installation place is limited to the vicinity of the line output terminal.
In addition, such a conventional facsimile equipment, even if it is of a small size type, has such basic constituent elements as a recorder and a reader, which results in that the facsimile equipment still has a size and a weight unsuitable as a portable one.
These years, there have been widely spread carrying type electronic equipments which include Japanese word processors and personal computers, and these equipments have been made smaller in size and weight to such an extent that they can be called so-called book size.
One of portable facsimile equipments put presently in practical use is a so-called attache case type (carrying case type) facsimile equipment which attache case incorporates the aforementioned constituent elements of the conventional facsimile equipment. This portable facsimile equipment is placed on a desk in an office or the like, connected to a modular jack connected to a telephone set or acoustically connected to a handset of the telephone set through an acoustic coupler to realize facsimile transmission/reception through wired line.
However, even such a portable type of facsimile equipment has a disadvantage that, since the facsimile equipment must be connected to the wired line to attain its facsimile transmission/reception, this inevitably limits its application place and thus the facsimile equipment cannot be used in such a place having no wired line as, for example, in a car.
Further, since such a portable type of facsimile equipment also has a thermal recorder for printing (recording) data on recording paper, the necessity of the recording paper, the recording head, drive circuit, etc. in the recorder inevitably places some restrictions on realization of a small-size, light-weight portable facsimile equipment. In addition, a high power supply capacity is required to drive the recorder, which hinders miniaturization of a power supply. It is impossible for a battery to drive the recorder, which is highly inconvenient.
Furthermore, since the portable facsimile equipment cannot select the received image data and merely can record it, unnecessary part of the image data is also inconveniently recorded.
Also, the image data reader is fixedly mounted to the body of the facsimile equipment, which leads to the fact that the facsimile equipment cannot read data of such as non-definite form document as newspaper or book and can read data of only a single page of document sheet having a predetermined size (such as A4, B4 or B5). For this reason, editing of image data to be transmitted, for example, selective assignment of a necessary part thereof cannot be attained, and thus all the image data of a sheet of an original document inserted into a document insert slot must be inevitably transmitted. Thus, when it is desired to transmit only necessary part of the image data of the document to be transmitted, the sender inconveniently must first copy the original, cut off a necessary part from the copied sheet with use of scissors, paste it on a predetermined size of paper sheet to create a new document for transmission, and then insert the new document into the original insert slot for its transmission; or the sender inconveniently must cut the part and insert it into the original insert slot for its transmission.